Matinee Monday: After Earth (w/ Paul F. Tompkins)
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Now it's time for...

Hello, people of Earth, and welcome to How Did This Get Made? I am joined, as always, by June Diane Raphael. How are you, June? Good. How are you, Paul? Very good. And Jason Manzikas. How are you, Jason? Just great, Paul. Just great. We have a very special guest with us today. Hello.

The lovely, the talented, the enormously funny Paul F. Tompkins. Oh, hello. Something very unnerving to me about seeing a married couple be so formal with each other. How are you? I'm fine, Paul. How are you? And you, you are doing well? I don't know. I'm fine. You guys have woke up together, have spent the whole day together. That's going to be a question of life.

I'm gonna answer it. I'm doing well. - June, did you wanna address your allergy attack on the show? - The first five minutes of this movie was a wash 'cause I was having a severe allergy attack. - Oh, I didn't know what was going on there. - A severe allergy attack. - Oh, and we should let everyone know, we saw this movie together. - Yes, we did. - Just minutes ago. - Yes. - This is the second time we've ever done this. - We're still vibrating. - Yes, it is.

But one of my eyes was tearing uncontrollably throughout the entire movie. On the drive over. Like a duct had like just been. On the drive over, you were using a t-shirt to wipe your eyes. Because I had nothing in the car. And it got worse for you for the first five minutes. It was the craziest thing. And my nose was running. Like your eye was leaking? Yes. Oh, you got a leaky eye. I had a leaky eye for the first five minutes of the movie. But.

Okay, so then do you need us to explain anything to you? Well, here's what I've wrote down. Do you think you missed anything during your leaky eye period? The first question I have is about what... What happened? What is a street fighter? We're...

Was Will, baby Will Smith, was he doing an accent? Yes. Well, that was the thing I was so confused about because he was British. Like certain people in this movie were British and others not. Yes. Everyone was doing what I think was supposed to be a future accent. Yes. Really? Yes, absolutely. Yes. And the person who was doing it the least was Will Smith. Yes.

And the person who was doing it the most was one of the guards early on in the movie. I think one of the guards that tells Jaden Smith that he can't be a space ranger. Yes. He's very British. Okay, so wait a second. Well, it was sort of like South African, and then sometimes it was like a reggae accent. Yes. I felt like I was watching, that is an old reference, but iClaudius, like a PBS, it was like a very, I'm talking like, it was very pronounced. Everybody spoke in very measured tones. But sometimes, you know,

Sometimes people would say like, "That sucks."

Yeah. Yeah. He says a lot. Will Smith, again, not paying attention to the accent part. He's like, that is pretty cool. Yeah, or like, God damn it. And then other times they were speaking like robots. It was so weird. Well, yeah. I couldn't. See, I thought Jaden Smith had just some terrible accent that he couldn't lose for the movie. Well, that's what I thought, too. I thought I had not seen The Karate Kid. Does he have an Ambrose accent? I thought he had a speech impediment. That's bad.

When it first started. During my allergy attack. During the voiceover? Yeah. I was spinning out and thinking, oh, this sucks for this kid because he has a speech impediment and he's a terrible actor. That's like two strikes against you if your job is to portray different people again and again. And then I thought his performance actually was not that bad as it went on. I thought it was great. Yeah. I didn't think he – I know a lot of people have been – Wait. I thought it was great? Wait. What happened? What? What?

I thought it was great. He was not bad. I thought the whole third act of the movie, he really pulled off. I feel like people are really ripping on Jaden. I don't think that Jaden... I think there's a lot of problems with this movie. I think Jaden did his best. Hey, look, if an actor is being told, like, hey, go over and talk to that giant bird over there. Have a chat with a giant bird. Real conversational. And he goes...

What is he saying? Hey, thanks, man. Hey, thanks, man. Hey, thanks. Hey, thanks. I couldn't... I guess... Okay. Everybody's going to be nice to Jaden, I guess. I thought he was terrible. But in his defense, he's acting for...

The vast majority of the movie against no one. He's acting in a vacuum. There are no... It is hard to gauge levels. It is hard to... He's just looking off camera and delivering lines as if he's in a scene with his father, which his father is not there. We'll basically just give you the outline of this movie, which is...

In the future, Earth has to be evacuated. Everyone gets on these ships. They go to a different planet where they all adopt the British accent. The whole world just jumps on that. That's what I think, by the way, the accent was supposed to be, as though the whole Earth had just people from all over had now colonized together. And everyone decided to speak English. Yeah, English is the main accent. And the accents all fused together to sound like that.

So there on this planet, Will Smith is the head of this ranger corps kind of thing. He's a very decorated soldier because he has no fear. And it's important to have no fear because there is a race of aliens that can smell fear. But he's very successful at beating those aliens because he does not have fear. Yeah, the aliens, they otherwise cannot see you. They do not know you're there. Like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. You do something called ghosting. Yes.

That's in the voiceover in the beginning. This phenomenon is known as ghosting. And I was like, go fuck yourself. So basically, you know, Will Smith and his son have a bad relationship, but Will Smith takes his son out on some sort of space adventure. Because his wife is like, you know what?

you know what, there's a boy in there who needs a father. And he's like, well, I guess I'll just put you on a spaceship with me and we'll go into space. With a deadly creature aboard? We'll load up one of the most deadly things that hunts us into the cargo bay and then we'll go on a space adventure. One of the main issues in their relationship is that Jaden...

Years earlier had witnessed the death of his sister. Yes. Who tried to ghost and fight this alien, but he smelled her fear. Well, yeah, the sister put him in a little planter. What are those things called, Dan? A terrarium. A terrarium. Thank you. She fit him for you. He survived visiting a terrarium. But we're supposed to understand that the subtext of their relationship is that Will Smith is resentful that this boy didn't fight on behalf of his sister.

Six years old. At the max. At max. He's six years old. He's old enough to fit in a planter. And by the way. It's something that is meant to hold plants. By the way, I do love how they reveal it. The entire movie, you're looking at it over his shoulder. So you see he's in a bubble. But at the end, the camera pulls back to reveal it's a very small terrarium.

It really was. Some scattered plants on the ground. Yeah, and Jaden doesn't play the part of, I mean, this is an even younger child actor who's a six-year-old. Yes, and so Will Smith was mad that the six-year-old didn't throw down with the giant eight-foot-tall alien who's known for crucifying all the humans. By the way,

That was a crazy thing as well. Yes. The alien loves to not just kill humans, but then kind of stick them into trees. Yeah, it hails them on things. And as is later explained, it's a pheromone trap. Yep. So that you'll see it, you'll be afraid, and you'll just stand there looking at it. And the monster comes along and gets you. That's right. Okay. But then also- That's how it triggers your fear. I noticed that these monsters, they don't eat people.

They just seem to murder people. That's all they want to do. Kill. So it's just very specific race of aliens that just, their whole deal is we want to kill human beings at the end. Don't ask us any other questions about it. Who cares? This is what I think was happening though. Those aliens aren't

The aliens. Those are like the aliens' dogs, basically. Those aren't the race of aliens that are like... Wait, wait, wait. What? I think those things were dropped. Remember they dropped from the sky? They were the aliens basically, I think, dropped those things onto Earth to just kill everything.

Oh. That's what I think those things were like killing like wild, a pack of wild dogs basically. They were not like the intelligent life forms that were, did anybody else? No. Wow, I didn't get that. That's a good idea though. Yeah, it's really, it's hard because there's so much information coming at us in the first two minutes of the movie. Yeah, and with a leaky eye. When I got a leaky eye. But they really, they really kind of go like, here's everything that you need to know. Okay, okay, let's go. And then three days earlier. Yeah.

Yes, I don't know. It opens like an alias episode. I don't know why Earth. But I really actually don't know what happened to Earth. We polluted it. Wait, was that what happened? At the very beginning, there was a quick montage of pollution. Oh.

Again, I couldn't see through it. And then we went. Then what happened was. See, there you go. Because of the smog, probably. Yeah. Right. So we, because of our cars and driving around in our big cars, we ruined the earth. Then we found Nova Prime. We went to Nova Prime.

But what we didn't realize was that aliens would attack us on Nova Prime by dropping these attack dogs on us. Wait, wait. So the aliens... Oh. So the aliens never even attacked Earth. No. The only alien on Earth was the one they brought in their own ship. Got it. So, okay. So we destroy the planet with pollution. Then we travel...

Interstellar travel to another planet that's habitable. Oh, I love, by the way, that part of the way that is explained is long lines leading to like space shuttles. Yeah. As if like, okay, everybody get in line. We're all getting on our rocket ship to go into outer space. But it was like, it looks like Disney World. It was just like, okay, yeah, well, since I know enough, the next one will come. It's like a subway line. Exactly. We're probably gonna have to make multiple trips.

So we get to this other planet, and then finally, presumably someone has scouted this planet out, and they've tested it. Yes, we live there. So eventually it's time, like, yes, let's bring all human beings to this planet. Everyone is brought to the planet. And then these aliens decide we're going to wipe everybody out. I think so. But then they didn't wipe everybody out because it seemed like their planet, I mean, I guess...

The alien attack must have stopped because they were in very nice apartment buildings. Yeah, I think they were in some sort of war situation with these things. Because he's out in the field doing these missions and blah, blah, blah. But on a different planet, it seemed like.

Yeah, that's true. I'm not sure. It didn't seem like there was an imminent threat in their apartment. Their apartment complex seemed like... No, I agree with that. But there is that scene where he's introduced and he's got his sword and he just walks right up to the Ursa and just cuts it in half. And that's like the same kind of... That looked like the same geography as the planet. I don't know why I care about this. By the way, none of this has anything to do past five minutes of the movie. The first half.

But here's the question, though. Why were they bringing this alien, Ursa, outside of the planet? Well, they explained that they were going to bring it to another planet to use it for ghosting exercises. Oh, I see. So they were transporting the alien to do testing on it. Did they establish that anyone else besides Will Smith was successful at ghosting? No. That was the thing that was really interesting. He seemed to be... And by ghosting...

He also has lost all emotions. Yes. It seems like he has no, like, so he is emotionless, which is a tough thing for a movie to have

Two characters, one without emotions and the other one without an acting partner. So you're stacking the deck against these people in a major way. It really is like a robot talking to a robot. It is very through a TV monitor. Yes. That's the thing is like Jaden's got a TV monitor on his wrist and Will has TV monitors in front of him. And the whole movie basically, there's Spaceship –

spaceship crash lands on Earth. It's very much like Lost. There's a tail section and there's the front section. No Michelle Rodriguez. There's no Michelle Rodriguez. There is no others. But Will Smith is hurt. They need to fire a beacon to get saved. So he sends Jaden Smith

100 kilometers across Earth's... Apparently across every climate of Earth known. Yes, they end up on the worst possible place, the planet Earth, where, as Will Smith explains, everything...

Every living creature on this planet has evolved to kill human beings. Why? Who knows? Don't know about it. Don't know why. Humans, by the way, aren't even there anymore. And that's not true from what we saw. Nope. Those bison seemed pretty cool. The bison seemed fine. There was a bird. The pigs. There is now this utopia of animals where every type of animal lives in the same place. There's bison's hyenas. Yep.

Giant birds. Gigantic hogs. Gigantic birds. That's right. Tigers. Snakes. Possums, I think. I don't mean to poke holes in any of the logic of this movie, but it was established in the beginning that Will Smith was a part of this ranger core that helped them move to the new planet. So arguably, Will Smith is not that old. He's probably in his 50s, right? He's old enough to have a 19-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son. Yeah.

So, you know, roughly... Why did she have to be 19, by the way? That's a strange choice. It was an interesting age. Yeah, just make her like 16. Yeah, 19. Or 20. Yeah. 19 is a weird age.

So anyway, he did all this. So you would imagine, at the most, Earth has been uninhabited for 20 plus years. That didn't even occur to me. There's no sign of anything. No sign of... Cars or roads or anything. No sign that people were ever there. It's as if...

the entirety of humanity, it would, it's gone obviously, but had never been there. Never, and as if the world had like rebooted. And I get like, I am legend, like, oh, grass may have grown up through like the Empire State Building or something like that, but there is nothing, there's no, there's not even a remnant. He doesn't even walk by a car.

There's nothing that, oh, this used to be a house. But he does fall into a pit of Native American art. Oh, yeah. I find some cave paintings. It's also in this, say, two-decade span, brand new animals have evolved. Yes. There's modern pterodactyls. It's like these giant buzzard eagle creatures. Then there's also these lion-tiger monsters that they love to eat birds. Yep.

They love baby birds. They love eating baby birds. Baby, baby. And for the majority of it, he seems to be in like a redwood forest. Yes. And then there's a giant volcano. But here's my, here's my. That he gets to, that he climbs to the top of in about half a day. Oh. Not even. Quicker, I felt. I felt he did that in a run. I feel like that was like a 20 minute run. And an extreme, there's an extreme winter neighborhood.

He just crosses the line and instantly succumbs to hypothermia. At a certain time, the world becomes, his dad explains it, it becomes inhabitable and you have to be in a hotspot or you'll freeze to death. Oh, I see, I see. But at that time, he has to, and then... I want to see something with these hotspots, too. Yeah. The one time we see him really have to confront, like he's running out of oxygen or something's happening and he needs to get into a hotspot...

The bird picks him up and drags him over. His hot spot in this freezing cold weather is like there's a couple leaves on him. No, the bird is on top of him. The bird was the hot spot. I didn't realize the bird was on top of him. The bird kept him under his wing. The bird sort of made a nest around him. That's gorgeous. The bird sacrificed itself for him. Spoiler alert, guys. I didn't understand that. I didn't know

why the bird died. I didn't know why the bird died either. It froze to death. Too cold. Too cold. To which Jaden went over and said, hey, thanks to that bird. Too cold? Too cold. Too cold. That's a bird that's too cold. But it was still all green there.

Because the cold had... Because in the morning... It got warm again. It gets warm again and everything comes back to life. Remember all the things would close because it was getting cold? Oh, that's why they were doing that. Yeah. Okay. But I would also argue... All the plants and stuff were... Why does this need to be Earth? Why couldn't it have just been a planet? You wouldn't have had to listen to any of these rules because there was nothing... If this movie was on Xeno 5...

Fine, yeah, I buy it. Like, here's a crazy creature. Like, it wasn't like Earth evolved. It wasn't like you saw anything of Earth. If anything, the movie posits the idea that without humanity, like, the planet would flourish, you know? Yeah, it would be better. It would be a lot better place, except that the air quality is bad. Yeah, air quality. You have to breathe in a special inhaler in order to be able to breathe the new air. Which is so odd, though, because the plant life is amazing. Yeah. So...

See, I wasn't getting that the air quality was bad. I thought that they just had been away from oxygen for so long or whatever. I kind of thought that too. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's it. Because there was so much. Okay, then that makes sense. I think we can all agree that was not explained clearly. Yeah.

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Could we just talk about, we're talking about formality in Husband and Wives with June and I. We should talk about Will Smith and his wife.

Oh my God. When she comes in, when he comes in rather with a necklace and it scares her, she's legitimately afraid of him approaching her with a necklace. She's first of all, she's doing like, uh, this dumb future thing where it's like, it's some three dimensional, um,

display in front of her and it looks like she's designing something like a building or something like that. I thought she was like an architect or something. She does tubular design, turbine designs. Oh, sure. That's what she does, turbine designs. He walks in in the background and she hurriedly makes the display disappear. Why?

I don't know, but she reacts with fear. It's almost like she was caught planning a surprise party. Yeah. She's like, as if, as if she's going, as if he's going to be like, were you fucking working? Is that what you were doing? And it's like an abusive relationship where he's like, you don't work when I'm home. Where's our dinner pills? And he tries to slap over the hologram, but he just can't get through it. So then he comes up behind her and he puts this around her.

There's like a hacky sack on a chain. I thought it looked like a circular rock in a net. Like, I was like, so. It did not look comfortable at all. But it comes into her field of vision and she jumps a mile into the air and then has to very quickly pretend like this is a great thing that's happening. Ow.

Oh, oh my God. Well, there's so many things I want to talk about in this movie. But that relationship is... And then the woman, the wife, is like, well, take your son out on this trip. It's going to be good. But before they leave, this is the thing that I love most.

It's so futuristic. They're not living in the Terminator 2 style world. Yeah, it's not a dystopia. No, they are clearly, there is something flourishing in this community. And then, as Will Smith is getting on board the ship to go, he is greeted by a man in a futuristic wheelchair, which is way more complicated than...

a real wheelchair. It's like a seat on a graviton thing. It looked so bulky. It was like, ah, wheelchairs were too simple. Requires two people to push it. Yes, two people. And then you can't get out of it either. So,

So you would think like in the future, maybe they just put like a small jet pack on your waist and you can kind of stand up and walk around. Like in a world in which like they can jump off of cliffs and fly. Fly. They have suits that can fly. Because all that was wrong with that man was that he had lost one leg. Yeah. Yes. That was it.

And then he was like, stand me up. Stand me up to the two men. So the two of them labor difficultly to get him on his one leg, which would not be that hard. It really wouldn't be. So that he can salute Will Smith. And by the way, it's the future. They should probably have... We have prosthetics now. Oh, yeah. We have prosthetics now. Like, really good ones. Here's what else. We have crutches. Yeah. There's, like, so many things. Here's the thing. Like, I feel like they...

They wrote that moment in because they were so... Because that moment really only serves as the end moment when Will Smith stands up because he's got a leg problem. He stands up for his son and says, get me up, get me up. And he salutes his son as his son comes in. But it's so weird that they did that because...

It was almost like you could tell they were nervous that the end moment wouldn't play unless we had seen someone. Yeah. Unless we saw a soldier get up out of being very uncomfortable to give a salute. Like that wouldn't have an emotional resonance. Right. Like, by the way, his father is like the head of this organization. His son saved his life. Spoiler alert. That's the end. But like, so it wouldn't have an emotional resonance of the father, like salutes his son. It works.

If you just say that, it works. You don't need to see. I think it would have worked more at the end if the guy didn't have so much trouble getting up from the chair. Yeah. It would have had more of an impact that Will Smith is struggling to make this happen. Oh, yeah.

So stupid. And the guy, it was even harder for him to sit back down in the wheelchair. Why was that more difficult? He was almost like a board, stiff as a board. He kind of went back like he had no bending ability whatsoever. Burrowing his head into that other guy's neck. By the way, M. Night, here's like the

I mean, you can say a lot of things about M. Night Shyamalan. Have we said this movie is directed by M. Night Shyamalan? We have not. What a twist! I should have waited until the end. Did you know what? I thought there was going to be a twist in this movie because in the very beginning of the movie when the ship is crashing, Will Smith is in front of Jaden and he's calming him down. He's whispering him to him. He's like, okay. And then Will Smith gets sucked out of the ship and

And I was like, oh, this is all in the boy's head the entire time. His dad, and he made up the whole mission. Oh, that would have been interesting. And that's what I thought. No, it was not. Well, not only does he... Okay, so Will Smith gets...

Sucked away. That was a great moment. The ship is crashing because Will Smith noticed by holding a keychain up to the wall that there's some specific kind of radiation or something that's going to cause this. It's just so convoluted. It's somehow going to cause an asteroid storm.

to happen, right? Yes. Okay. The crew is like, I don't know. That's pretty impossible. He's like, I think it's going to happen. And then it happens. And by the way, Will Smith never did any of this with any sort of panel's knowledge. It was just simply the keychain against the wall. He gets out of his seat, looks confused,

Quizzical walks over the window, holds the thing against the window, and it vibrates against the window. And then he goes to the cockpit and is like, we're about to hit an asteroid storm. Can I tell you what I thought was happening in that moment? I didn't know any of this. I thought that he woke up because his son was next to him when he fell asleep.

And when he woke up and did that thing with the keychain, I thought he was listening in on a conversation and could hear that his son was about to go try to ghost with that animal. Also would have been more interesting. We also, by the way, didn't even talk about those guys in the sun. The sun is kind of exploring the ship and there's a big sign that says, don't enter, don't go in here. And he walks right in. He walks through this wheat curtain. There are no doors in the future. There are no doors.

doors in the future. It's all curtains and mesh panels and everything is, there are literally no doors. Everything in this movie was, I guarantee M. Night was like, you know what? You know what's different about my movie? No doors. There,

Everything in this movie also looked gross to touch. It was all like, like squishy, like, like it was all like. And when anything exploded, like the two halves of the spaceship, both of them after the post crash are just billowing white, like a fabric. It looked like a toilet paper exploded all over the place. I was like, I,

this makes no sense. It was as if the ship crashed and its sails were everywhere. As if it was a spaceship that had sails. It made no sense. Earth was covered with some of those white sheets as well. Everything looked like a kind of futuristic pool umbrella. Like,

It was like sun shield or something. It made no sense. Oh, so they're crashing. And then, but we must talk about the ghosting. They're crashing. And so Will Smith's trying to calm Jaden Smith down. Then he gets sucked away. And then a few seconds later, this, the ship splits in half and these people get sucked out the other side of Jaden Smith's field of vision. And,

So then after they finally crash, he goes to look for his dad. He just goes to the other end of the thing and he's there. He's fine. Right there. His dad got... He wasn't strapped in. How did he not get... When you saw Will Smith get sucked away, he got sucked away on loss. So hard. It looked like he was going through a wormhole. That's how far and deep...

Wait, a wormhole? So you think, so you felt as though perhaps he was traveling through space and time? He was going really quick and really fast. But by the way, Hugh, I mean, if you would argue the ship is a tube...

The way that he got sucked through that, he went from one end to the other. And the way that they positioned it in the movie is like he went a foot to the left. It was as if they were at the end of a vacuum cleaner and someone turned it on. And you would think Will Smith would have gone all the way into the bag. But he was around the corner. He was just stuck in a corner. I don't pretend to know a lot about spaceships.

But I think if you're around a corner... Yeah, I don't know from spaceships either. By the way, it helps me... For me, it helps me to think of the spaceship as a vacuum cleaner. Sure. By the way, what a better movie would it have been if Will Smith was on one side of the ship and he was on the other side and he had to get to his dad. Ooh, I love this. And same thing, because... See, I actually...

I did like the basic conceit of the movie and the story that they were – I mean, I guess we'll get to Scientology in a second or two. Okay. But just the basic sort of setup of the movie and him and his dad being – you know, his dad falling apart on the ship and him traveling and all of that stuff and getting back to his father and his own fears. Like, I thought that that was actually a really compelling story and really –

There's nothing wrong with the basic idea. Yeah, there's nothing, nothing wrong with the basic idea. It's very similar. We were talking about this afterwards. The movie is very similar to the movie Oblivion in a lot of ways. In the future, Earth is dead, but there are some people on it that need to survive against aliens that are hunting them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, it is...

Like, in a lot of ways, Beat for Beat, very similar. Except for, spoilers for Oblivion, it's the fucking stupidest movie I've ever seen. Do you think that, like, Will Smith and Tom Cruise had, like, a dinner together and they both kind of, like, got excited about an idea and they both went, like, it's almost like a game of telly. Called people. Like, write this. Because this movie, at the end, did not realize this.

Story by Will Smith. Oh, yeah. This is a story by Will Smith co-written by M. Night. Not even, it's not an M. Night original. And also, was this movie all shot in Philadelphia? I don't know. Well, I don't think, M. Night Shyamalan is not allowed to do what he wants anymore, right? Right, yes. Those privileges have been taken away. He's in director jail, I think. No more twists.

You can't set everything in Philly. So it's got to be, you just direct this thing, make it look good. Yes. Don't screw this up. And just take out everything that's charismatic about your actors. Because he has an amazing, I've watched Will Smith. I like Will Smith. And I think, I don't know, I haven't watched Karate Kid, but it seems to me that Jaden is also charismatic.

He did everything he could to make them the least charismatic. Like, this is the least charismatic. It's so flat. It's so flat. And there is so little by way of action, too. Like, I feel like the alien that you're always afraid is going to be after Jaden Smith only shows up in the last five minutes. It's not like... And there are a couple of things like where the big bird gets him. Oh, my God. When he... Okay. Okay. Guys...

Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. He's flying. He jumps off a cliff and he's flying in his flying suit. And then the giant bird... Which is like a sort of flying squirrel kind of thing. Exactly. Like a base jumping suit or something. Which he's never done before. And he runs off, I would say, like a 500 foot high cliff.

Probably even higher because he's flying a little higher. Well, first what happens is he's lying. I don't know if I had to explain so much. But he's running out of inhalers so that he can breathe on the planet. He's lying to his dad. His dad, at this moment, make or break, realizes he only has two inhalers left. And he instantly pushes a button. This is amazing. He pushes a button. The dad is in the cockpit of the crashed plane.

Spaceship. With two broken legs. Two broken legs. One of them broken very badly. Very badly. He does not appear to feel pain. Oh, because... But he's not taking the painkillers. Well, because the pain medication clearly says in giant letters on the front, like, what... Giant LED letters. It will impair...

Drowsiness. It caused extreme drowsiness. Extreme drowsiness. Extreme drowsiness. It's a giant pillbox. It's like a display. It's an LED display on it. Everything has LED displays. Anyway, so he realizes Jaden only has two things left and he pushes a button and it instantly maps out

how far Jaden needs to walk to get to the tail of the plane. And it says, and it's measured in vials. It's measured in inhalers. So it's like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, like the little red line in Indiana Jones. And it says 3.15 inhalers. And then it's like, then he puts it in again and it says, oh, but if he jumps off of the waterfall, if he sky jumps, then he can make it in 2.1 inhalers.

And Will Smith. The only successful route. Yes. And also, by the way, Jaden does not know anything about the SkyJump. No. It has not been revealed to him. He does not. Oh, also hasn't been revealed to us. Yes. Like this is all brand new that this is a thing. So basically him and his dad get into this fight where the dad kind of says, yeah, you are responsible for my 19-year-old daughter getting killed because he's hitting that terrarium, you little jerk.

And he goes, I'm going to do it. By the way, can I just say one other thing? I actually found that pretty offensive because this idea that just because he's a man, as a child, he should have gotten out and protected her. It's like the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Did everybody think that? I thought that that was what Jaden was afraid the father thought, but it wasn't really what Will Smith thought. I think Will Smith did not seem to be talking him out of that. No, he was like,

He's like, are you upset with me because I didn't save my daughter? He's like, all that matters is how you feel about that situation, not what I feel. It's like the craziest thing. Is that Scientology? I think that's Scientology. Is that Scientology? I think that's what that is because I think it's really, it's like, this isn't about what I think about you, Jaden. This isn't about what I think happened. You need to decide for yourself what you think is right. Anyway, so Jaden jumps off the cliff.

At the same time, it's like... Leap of faith. At the same time. I mean, as the mother kept on saying to him, like, your son feels very guilty. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't he say, you know, you had nothing to do with her death? Because you're a six-year-old child. Because you're a child. And you're my son, and I'm glad you're not dead. Yeah. Which you would have been. You would have both been dead. A 12-foot-tall beast versus a five-year-old kid. Not going to do a good job. Considering that when we ever see these five-foot-tall beasts, they're ripping apart humans nonstop. Oh. The beast ate a bunch, didn't even eat, just ripped off monkey heads. Yeah, he found a bunch of monkeys, just ripped their heads and arms off.

Also, the first encounter Jaden has with life on Earth is these baboons. Yes. Oh, this is crazy. That he tries to scare this one baboon off by throwing a rock

Wait a second. Don't you think like, so that baboon kind of comes, it's just a monkey. It's not even doing anything too crazy. And Jaden, who has shown no sign of aggression or anything, like he's kind of like, the dad's like, hey, just chill out. Chill out over here. Hang out. And he's like, immediately he's like, no, I'm going to take this rock and throw it in that monkey's face. Only angering the monkey. There is no,

way that that would have worked. Anyone would know that. I think that was to show he is fearful. He's chosen fear. He's chosen fear. He's fearful and he's acting out. That's like when he then is being chased by the monkeys. Outrunning them. Outrunning them. By a good margin. On their home turf. On their home turf.

We've established he's a very good runner. Oh, that's true. I forgot. That was established that he beat Will Smith's record in some marathon so he can outrun these animals. And a giant pack of them. It's like thousands of them. Oh, yeah. Thousands of baboons chasing him. And all he has to do is go into water. And they are like, oh, no, no, no, no. Somehow Will Smith knows, run to the river. Baboons, they'll never, they'll never.

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Here's the other thing. If you were to map out his journey, he's on so many detours all the time. He has no map. He has no map. He doesn't know where he's going. The only thing he does is when he's in the cave, he draws a map for himself. Which is a straight line. Which is a timeline. It's basically a timeline. What else happened? I saw those hogs by that cave.

And he is in the cave with the caveman drawings that existed. So he got to walk by. Oh, my gosh. Oh, but wait a second. So he jumps off the cliff. He's flying. And a giant bird, like some sort of enormous bird, picks him up or grabs him and is chasing him. Very much like Lord of the Rings style, I guess. Yeah, like an enormous bird. And then he blacks out, right? The feed goes dead. And in my mind, I thought to myself –

If he wakes up in a giant bird's nest, I'm going to lose my mind. And guys, he wakes up in a giant bird's nest. It's as big as our home. It is a one-bedroom bird's nest. You can't.

And then, oh, when he's woken up. And there are hatched birds. Hatched tiny birds. Well, they're not even too tiny because the bird test is so large. They're tiny in comparison. But the bird kind of starts pecking at Jaden's face like, hey, man, get out of here, bird.

And then lions come and attack them. Lions climb up, I would say easily, a 60-foot tall tree, a lot of them, to get some baby bird snacks. Yep. And they're all climbing. To be fair, they did just kill the baby birds. They did not eat them. Oh, that's true. This is, again, like every living creature in this movie just kills. That's all it does. Everything wants to murder. Nothing wants to eat. Yeah.

And Jaden has to have a fight in a bird's nest, which was a great scene. Him and the bird work in tandem together. You take the inside, I'll take the outside. He works a lion towards the exit of the bird's nest and the bird sits in and pulls that out and throws him down. I've never seen such a scene.

What? I would have watched that movie. So guess what? You got a new partner. As long as it's not a giant bird, it is. Oh, shit.

Oh, and also, Karate Kid and Giant Bird. Before, when he's trying to escape from the bird, he flies into a waterfall, which the bird is like, uh-oh. All these animals. Everything's terrified of water. Terrified of water. I couldn't figure out for the life of me why the only weapon available in the future is a sword. Yeah. It's basically a two-edged sword. It's kind of like Darth Maul's lightsaber in that both sides are blades. Yes.

And the blades can separate. It has 29 sword settings. It's like a Swiss Army sword. Yeah. It has a million... It can turn into a hoe. Yeah. It can turn into a scythe. It can turn into like a... The last one, it turns into like a drill bit or something. It kind of can be... Is it like a scroll too? I thought he read something on it at one point. I couldn't figure out. I was like...

Are there really not really awesome guns? Oh, yeah. No guns. No guns. Just swords. Everybody's battling horrifying things. And their weapon of choice is something you need to use close up. Yeah. And by the way, it's a good point. It's only close contact fighting. And it seemed like it was... My gut is it had to be a hologram. Because, oh, he's like, use my sword. He called it something else. But he's like, use my sword. My cutlass. My cutlass. But it...

But there couldn't have been those blades inside there. So I feel like they must have been hologram projections of weapons. Are we trying to figure out the science of this? It might be sloppy filmmaking. No, no. It didn't even occur to me. Yeah, that's just... It's just stupid. Yeah, oh. It's just stupid. It's extremely dumb. It's sort of like saying we're not allowed to make it made out of light because somebody else already did that. Yes. Guys, can we talk about...

about the moment where as Will Smith is dealing with both he loses contact with Jaden at one point and he's also really in a lot of pain that's almost making him pass out blinding just like white pain yes we're monitoring his medical progress the whole time he tries to do

He's doing a bypass on himself. Will is doing surgery on himself. It's not successful, unfortunately. It was so complicated what he must have had to have done because he had to attach a tube into an artery and then attach the other half of the tube to the other artery to connect his... And he did that all by sitting and not really... He had a bloody scalpel. He had a bloody scalpel. Okay. But during these... When we cut back to him, he's having these flashbacks of...

His daughter, his 19-year-old daughter. And as he's like coming in and out of them, he keeps on saying no, no, no. Oh, yeah. Are we supposed to understand? Well, I guess we should talk about the moment where he, during a flashback, he's up in battle and she's at home celebrating a birthday. She wants him to blow out the candles. Oh, by the way, they're like eye chatting. That's Zoe Kravitz. They're FaceTiming. They're FaceTiming.

So she says, Dad, blow out the candles through FaceTime. And he says, no, I can't do it. He says, no, you know that won't work. You know that won't work. She's 19 years old. Yeah, exactly. This is a woman. This is something like I do with my nieces who are six, like who don't quite wrap their minds around the fact that like we can't actually connect over iTunes. Okay, but...

Then the mother comes into frame and says, come on, blow out the candles. And they're all laughing. Blow out the candles, dad. Blow out the candles. And then he does. Right. And the candles do get blown out. Wait, wait, wait. Hang on, hang on, hang on. Wait. June, what do you think happened? Oh, wait a second. I want to see what you think. Oh, no. June. Did you really not catch? Wait, wait, wait. Tell us your best guess of what happened. I'll tell you what I thought happened.

No wrong answers. There's no wrong answers. All right. I'm going to be totally honest. I'm going to be fearless. I'm going to take a knee and just be totally honest with what happened. I thought that Will Smith had totally like control, had gotten to a place where he had such mind control and power in his mind. Continue. Somehow. Yeah. I can't do this. To the screen. I'm fine. I'm fine.

What happened was, after the candles were blown out, a second later, his son came into frame. He blew out the candles. He was behind the camera. His son was behind the camera. That was the joke. And then he came around. I didn't get it.

Oh, my God. Okay. Oh, my God. I'm telling you, I didn't see that. I promise you, I did not see that the sun came in from behind. No. I swear, all I saw was that the sun appeared. Yeah, because he'd been off camera blowing out the candles. Okay, can we just, now, this is unclear, is what you just said?

To one out of four moviegoers, it was unclear. I mean, there is a lot that is confusing in this movie. That is not M. Night's Fall. That prank was not confusing. I honestly thought that the whole movie was about mind over matter. You can do it if you can think it. It kind of is. It kind of is. I was like, well, I guess you can blow out candles. Scream at us.

Oh, no. Paul and Jason got to experience something that is very rare, which is June in a movie. And you got to see a couple of the outbursts that happened. A bunch of big scares. There was one very big scare. Where she hit me and threw her pencil across the movie theater. What?

And we're in a movie theater that has maybe six other people in it. And there is a jump scare in the movie that is effective, I thought. There was a good jump scare. I mean, it was a good jump scare. But June's reaction was...

Complete horror. Complete, like as if she had been suddenly put into like a paranormal activity style. As if this person had appeared in the seat next to her. Yes. Keep in mind. I was pulling her down to an underworld. Because of June's leaky eye, she was also seated one empty seat away from us. I was too close to everybody. I was blowing my nose. It was too much. What was the other big scare that you had? You had another, oh, fuck.

It may have been when he was doing it. I think it was when the alien appeared. There are a couple of scares in this movie. There are a couple of good scares. The aliens, by the way, are...

Terrifically strong. Like they can cut through rock. Oh, yeah. Like just anything that's in their way, just tear through it. And they seem to be able to climb. They can do it all. They're kind of indestructible. But now in the beginning of that movie, Will Smith, when he's a ghost or ghosting, he just kind of takes a sword, stabs one.

falls down. Meanwhile, James Smith is fighting this one that looks smaller than that one. And he has to, like, it's nonstop stabbing in the head. He stabs it everywhere. He cuts off a leg. It's like, that did not slow down. Wait, one more question about the candle thing. Then,

If it was his son, then why was Will Smith the whole time like, I don't want to do this, I don't want to, because he was embarrassed in front of his son. He didn't know his son was there. He didn't want to go through the charade of pretending to do this in front of his cool army buddy. But they were like, okay, alright. They were showing that he has no sense of fun. He's a shitty dad. But meanwhile, on the

in the middle of battle when they have another flashback, he's having an eye chat with his daughter. And he's like, oh, God. It looks like an alien is coming over a ridge. Okay, wait, but even something crazier. Oh, the mole, yes. So she holds up their eye chatting or FaceTiming or whatever. He's on like a bluff, you know, like patrolling or whatever. And she says, look, a guy at school found this. And she holds up a book, the Moby Dick book.

His favorite book. Yes, his favorite book. And she's got a real book. And it's a real book. And he's like, oh, that's amazing. And she says, what did she say? He said I could hold it or touch it. He said I could hold on to it. And then there's a beat. And then Will Smith says, hold on to what? Yeah. And then I realized, oh, my God, they're making a dick joke. Dick joke.

As if she would say to her dad, he lent me this book and all I had to do was touch his dick. Hold on to it. That's what's so weird with the movie, though. It's like, that's a moment. Will Smith is a very charming actor who can land comedic moments. That's what is so weird about this movie. The moments of forced levity, of even that sucked and that beat of hold on to it are so strange. And she's like, dad.

And then there was another moment, the birthday camera. But we all know she's sexually active. The blow moment. Well, yeah, she was 19. She's getting in late all the time. She's a ranger. By the way, that was a little creepy, though. It's like she's playing this little girl. She's 19 years old. Like she was required to be sort of all over the place developmentally. Yes. That's true. I guess she was younger in some of the specials. But she was a ranger. No, I don't think she was. I think they just had her acting that way. I think they just had her acting...

I feel like, yeah, I feel like they, you think all the flashbacks were from the same time period. I think they were from the same weekend. Yeah. Well, because the little boy had a birthday. The little boy was killed. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. It's pretty much true actually. Yeah. She was killed on her birthday weekend. Uh,

After finishing Moby Dick and giving a handjob. And wasn't it also weird, though? Like, and maybe I'm reading into this, but I think we all laughed when she did say blow it out, blow it, or something. There was like a weird blow. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, I think, I don't know if they were going for a joke, but it felt awkward. Also, I have to say, the...

The whole conceit of, look at this. It's an actual book. It's from a museum. Yeah. It's the laziest future thing you could ever do. I'm so sick of seeing that. And just like, yeah, he loves Moby Dick. I want to talk about the one line that's a great line. Jaden Smith first out in the field. He's like, Dad, my suit changed colors. Oh, yeah. I like it, but I'm nervous. I thought I misheard that. It was so strange and weird.

why did he say that? I like it. He's like, I like it, but... I'm not complaining. I am not complaining. Don't you think he would have been trained? It's an improvement. The line is even crazier. He says, my suit just changed the color black. I like it, but I think it's bad. Yeah. It's like...

I like it, but I think it's bad. I wrote that down, yeah. I like it, but I think it's bad. What? By the way, can we talk about the names? We were saying Jaden and Will. It's Cypher Rage, Katah Rage, Fever.

Fire rage. Senshi rage. These are that. R-A-G-E? Oh, rage. R-A-I-G-E. Okay. Whoa. Here's my question, though. Rage. Look at that. Yeah, rage. He's got rage, but he holds it in. If Jaden is, his whole journey is about not showing fear and sort of coming to terms with like feeling danger and hiding his fear. What is Will Smith's?

in the movie. Will Smith does not change, right? His journey in the movie is to get his son to be like him. That's what it seems to me. And that's, I think, another argument for the psychology thing. Because I thought we were being set up for him to actually feel, because it seems like what you said, when he was able to not feel fear, he was also stopped feeling anything.

So it would follow that he would then feel love or be able to express it to his son, which he never really does. Well, they hug. They hug. That's the thing is Will Smith really doesn't change much because at the end he salutes his son. His son does not salute back. He hugs his dad. And he says, Dad, I want to work with Mom. And Will Smith says, I do too.

And then they go off and they start working the turbine fields. It's like, you're right. It really is like, there is no learning. There is no, like, nobody has an arc, you know, like Jaden just is, I feel like he becomes able to ghost, but it's still like a weepy, like emotion, emotion ridden boy. Dad's been yelling at him the whole movie. That's right. He should have saluted back. He should have saluted back and they shouldn't have undercut that moment because I,

I actually, in the last five minutes, I was really into what was happening. If he had, though, you'd be like... We were lying on the ground and the alien stepped over him. I actually felt like they're driving us toward us. And I got there and then it was so undercut by...

Well, it ends kind of like an old 80s movie, like an 80s buddy cop comedy because he's like, I want to work for your mom too. And then Will Smith goes down and as Paul said, they shine a lot of flashlights on him for all the medical officers to start shining flashlights. It's just like the dumbest future medical technology. It's all flashlights. Things with lights. It's like a cordless mouse and they just run all this stuff over him. So as he goes back down, after he says that line, Will Smith starts laughing like...

I want to work with mom too. Like, it's like, like a pan out, like, Oh boy. Like the boys are back in town. Tonight is gonna be a jailbreak. Uh, uh,

I wish Tim Lizzie would have scored this entire movie. I would be remiss to just mention that the video camera technology in this movie is insane. So Will Smith is watching his son. The video camera is supposedly on his back, but there are multiple times in the movie where he's seeing him. He's got a lot of angles. A lot.

of angles. But part of it is, I think, those drones he released are cameras that are all over the place. So they are providing some of that information. And at the end of the movie, once he does kill the big Ursa or whatever, and he's walking through the medical bay, there's this one cadet just watching

footage of the movie watching him destroy everything I didn't notice that oh yeah the guy the medical I was just laughing at that guy's expression no because his expression is oh my god it's him because he's literally on his computer it's like a YouTube video of J.D. he's here and he's

Oh shit, that's him guys. That's the guy that just killed the Ursa. I'm watching right now By the way, this is like a crew It seems like a very small crew like a crew of eight people that are on a rescue mission to rescue Will Smith and his son Like he would probably know all the details like oh, yeah, because it seemed like it was all they hadn't even left I have a question. Why when the rescue team shows up? Are they in like hazmat suits?

Because are they oxygen maybe? They don't need, just take one of those inhalers. Well, you know what? And you'll be fine. They're following the rules. That was a class one planet. You couldn't go there. Oh my God. Remember that? When they wormhole their way out of the asteroid field in the beginning. Which I thought was a cool thing. And they're right in front of an inhabitable, they're right in front of a planet.

and Will Smith just gets up. He notices a blinking red light. He gets up, pushes the red button, and it goes, Planet uninhabitable. Severe threats to humanity. Do not land under any circumstance. The computers definitely in this movie were not, they were so smart and advanced. They're like, oh, here's like five steps ahead of what you're thinking.

Right. There was another one where when Will Smith is plotting out the course that his son must take with the two inhalers, like what, what are the, what are the options here? And it was like the sky jump, this flashed on the screen, only survivable option. Oh man. Uh,

Boy, oh boy. Any final thoughts? A moment that we all enjoyed was when Will Smith is like, he's ready to pass out from broken legs. Well, one's badly, one's bad. One's broken, one's very badly broken. So he's dictating a message to his wife. Oh my God. Oh no! Dictates a message to his wife. Says, you know, compose a message to my wife. To my wife, I have lost contact with our son.

End message. That's the whole message. That is it. By the way, he seems to have liked his wife. He seemed to have, like, he gave her jewelry. Like, he didn't seem like their relationship was tense. No personal message to her. No, I love you. No nothing. Like, they should have brought the wife in at the end, too. Why not? Something. Why not have the ghost of the daughter smiling in the background? There is something about this. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi? Yeah, exactly.

Reunited with the alien. She does because she is in... She's on the raft with Jaden. Yes. She does come back in a kind of vision-y dream sequence kind of scenario. That was the big scare moment with... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Her face is so much a zombie. Wake up. You have to wake up. Wake up. She's telling him to wake up and then all of a sudden she changes into a mutilated version of herself. But I got to say...

She was not that mutilated. No, she was just a little bloody. It looked like somebody who did a bad Halloween costume. Like, oh, I'm a ghoul. Ghoul. Any other moments before we call it? The whole thing is just like, and I enjoyed it. You know, I did. But I did enjoy the movie. What did you enjoy about it? I think Paul left it, too.

No, I did not. You did? This movie was an hour and 40 minutes, and it felt like forever to me. It felt like a two-and-a-half-hour movie. By the way, it wasn't a saving grace. That last fight with the alien just felt like everything is a delay. To get there. Because of course he's going to fight that alien. He has to. Yeah. Right. And also, it's weird that...

I don't want to get too heavy about it, but it's very unpleasant to watch this little boy be afraid. I mean, what is he, 13 in the movie, I guess? Because he had like a little tiny beginnings of a mustache or something. Well, then in my case, he could have been nine. But you see, I think he was on the verge of...

basically being kicked out of his parents' house and being sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Bel Air. Yeah. So he was right at that age. So he's terrified through the whole movie. He just wants his dad to be his dad. And the dad is just saying, stop being afraid, you sniveling coward. In so many words. He's basically saying, don't be a pussy, man up. And then,

Will Smith has this speech that explains and it's terribly written about his first encounter with one of these aliens and what happened and how he just decided to not be afraid and that was it. Now you do that. It's horrible. It's a terrible message. When he decides not to be afraid, he...

has a callback, flashback to that monologue that we just heard just a couple of scenes earlier. And he's like, okay, yeah, I guess I don't understand how he was not afraid. Oh, by the way, we were talking about those computers and here's another one. When he sent these drones out around the planet and the drones are looking for the Ursa creature and they find that dead pile of monkeys and the computer's like, possible magic. That was what the Ursa killed this. Like it was like possible. Ursa signature. Yeah, they couldn't quite, the drones were,

couldn't quite determine whether or not this was the work of these aliens. Yeah. I guess because nothing was impaled? Well, because something else on the planet Earth is killing and stacking monkeys? No, but Will Smith is like, this is none of my business. It was a pile of dead monkeys. After the computer got shy, it's like, I don't want to say for sure. I don't want to say it is, and then it's not, and you're going to be mad at me. Because later, one of the other probes,

finds humans, you know, remains of the crew impaled on a thing. And it's like, possibility of Ursa traces? 100%. Oh, yeah. This time there's no mistaking it. Oh, man. The fucking... And then at the end, he literally has to climb like a volcano, like Lord of the Rings. Yes. In order to shine the beacon and flash a light so they can be rescued. It's fucking... This movie is...

It's not as boring as Avatar, not Avatar, The Last Airbender. It's not as boring as The Last Airbender, but it is boring for long stretches of time. Well, it's such a linear movie. It's like they crash land, you know he's got to get to the other side, you know he's got to fight this thing, and you know he's, it's all right there. And there's no, but there's no like fun, like Will Smith is,

fun. It's not fun on some level. Well, can I ask you this? Cause I haven't read any of the stuff, but so is the don't have fear, blah, blah, blah. Is that Scientology stuff? I think there's, there are certain Scientology. Like I think,

They've come out saying things as crazy as we can heal our own bodies just by thinking those thoughts and all that type of stuff. I think it is very much so mind over matter. Got it. And also the moment where he says, how do you feel about this? It's all about personal responsibility and not looking at anyone else. Interesting. But that's why it really did feel like...

a Scientology instructional video because there's no journey for Will Smith's character. It's simply just like, yeah, just be like him. He's right. He's right and just be like him. And even to the point where his son who is six years old at the time of this attack is like, it's up to you to decide whether or not you should have gotten out of that terrain. It's like, no, it's not at all. Not at all. Right. That's nuts. By the way, somebody should have said, this is not on you. Right. And no one

This is not on you. Everybody's like, you're going to have to decide if this is on you or not, bro. Which is basically saying this is 100% on you. Unless you say it's not. I'm not saying it is. Hey, you're the only one saying this. I'm just deciding what I feel for me. Now go over there and touch the wall. Then walk back and touch the window. But the moral of the movie is don't feel what you feel, right? I mean, that's basically it. Saying like,

Hey, don't say what you feel. I did like that element of it. Maybe I'm a Scientologist now. I don't know. But I did. Oh my God, it worked. Oh my God. The message boards are going crazy. I did like that idea of like, it's not that fear is not real or it's not that you're not in danger. It's just if you stay in the present moment and don't tell yourself the story of the future.

and what might happen because that really actually doesn't exist. I do think that was a... I do think that was... I actually do believe that. Like, the moment where he's like, don't think about what is, just look, smell, touch. What is your presence? And what are you feeling in your body? Which I like that. It's ignoring the fact that...

Fear is a biological necessity for living creatures. For survival. Yes, because you can't... You can be afraid and still accomplish the same things that this character was able to accomplish. But what this movie is saying is this creature only senses fear, so you have to absolutely not feel it at all, which is... That's crazy. That's crazy talk. That's impossible. And basically the reward in the movie is...

I feel like the movie is... The reward is love. It should have... That's how you earn it. Basically, it should have humanized Will Smith and instead roboticized Jaden. Yes, and we're supposed to be happy about it. And that is the hooray. That hooray moment is like, oh great, you fucking destroyed this generation, you fucking piece of shit. You've accepted your responsibility for your sister's death finally. Yeah. Well, it's...

Okay. Maybe what they were going for, though, is that Will Smith, what he came to at the end is that maybe he did fail as a father. And being a father would have just been to sort of be around more and love them. Well, you know what? I didn't get that. Wait, but this is why it doesn't work. Because in the beginning of the movie, Will Smith comes home in his dress whites after some sort of mission and reveals that he is retiring. He's like, I'm out. I'm out.

After this movie, like after this thing, I'm out. I'm retiring. After this movie. After this movie, I'm out. In one hour and 40 minutes, I am done. So at the end when he goes, I want to work for your mom too, he's already said that at the top of the movie. That this is his final mission. So it's like there's no growth even there. That's right. He's already made up his mind. Yeah. So it's like – so it's sort of like saying like you're already going to retire. Just to be clear, I'm not doing this for you. Yeah. Yeah.

There is no choice in this that is because of what has just happened. Except my willingness to accept this hug. Oh, man.

It's not going to work out good for the Rage family. The movie is just bad. But I mean, there could easily be sequels to this. Well, it was built to that end, from what I understand. It was built to be a book, a game. It was built in that very...

Is there any... I mean, does Battlefield Earth resemble this at all? It feels similar to Battlefield Earth in the sense that there are ideas of...

mind taking over for like freeing your mind and stuff like that. I saw that movie and I don't remember a single thing about it. What was it called? Rat Brains, right? That's what they called them all. Rat Brains. Listen, Rat Brains. Oh my God. But yeah, it is. It is kind of weird they would separate them for that long. Like why not have Will Smith with him for half the journey and then like. I thought he was going to heal his leg. Yeah. And he was going to join him and then no. No.

No, because that's the big thing that you think about the movie. By the way, everything that we really picked on in the beginning was like five minutes, like Will and the kid together. The rest of the movie is Will in a ship and the kid out. It seemed like Will Smith shot most of this movie maybe in like two weeks. I feel like this movie, the whole thing was shot in three days and then post-production was two years. Literally, because there's so much green screen, like an aggressive amount. Almost as much as Great Gatsby.

I didn't see, yeah, is it? I didn't see Great Gatsby, guys. Well, you know it had a lot of green screen. I guess it had a lot of green screen. I didn't mean to derail you, but go ahead. No, forget it. That was really shut Jason down. I feel really, I feel like I've been publicly outed as having not seen the Great Gatsby. I can't participate in this bit about it because I haven't seen it. You know what? I gotta go, guys. You didn't read DiCaprio magazine? Guys, I gotta go.

I can't do this. I was at a store the other day and I saw a magazine, DiCaprio Magazine, and it has him on the cover. What? Is it a weekly or a monthly? I think it's a monthly. It has to be. I mean, you know. Wow. Will Smith does have a sense of humor about this movie because he's on Kimmel this week.

And this is the first time he's not been in a number one movie in like 25 years. Because this movie did not do well, right? No, it came in number three. Oh, really? And he said, you know, the way he looks at it is, it's three number ones. That's how he decided. What?

Oh, because he's also... He and Jaden have their own special math, right? Yeah. That is beyond... There was some interview where... Was it... Oh, wait. Is this real? Yeah. There was some interview. It was a recent interview where he says that he and his son...

They have stumbled upon this new kind of math that other people don't understand, and they see numbers that don't exist or something. It's something crazy like that. I got to say, I did see him on Tavis Smiley one time, and he talked about being an alchemist.

and talking and turning... Wait, what? Space metal into gold, absolutely. You can find it. Oh my God. I'm just looking. So the movie took in $27 million at the box office in North America. There's no way it made its money back. No, no, no. Impossible. And the theater was pretty empty today. It is the...

For a Sunday afternoon. It is between the two biggest flops, which is Battleship and John Carter of Mars, as far as as much money spent. Wait, those are the two biggest? Oh, Kitsch. So that's three. So he's in the middle. He's in the middle. So he helped Kitsch kind of take a break here. I'm upset that I've seen two out of three of those movies. I saw both of those movies. I've seen all three of those movies now. You've seen all three? And yet you haven't seen Great Gatsby. No.

That's interesting. You know what? I don't want to talk about it to you. Have you read the book?

What? It's a book? Oh, brother. Well, I feel like we have an open-ended... Is there a comic book version of it? I'm sure there is. All right, I'll read that. Would anyone go recommend seeing this movie? Nah. See, I enjoyed it. You know what? You were entertained? It's bad. I was. I was entertained. I had a fine time. Maybe if it was on Netflix Watch Instant, on an airplane, I would maybe... You know what? Even then, I wouldn't enjoy it.

I'm going to just point out one thing here that Buzz Aldrin said that he thought was a quite action-packed story. Wait, is Buzz Aldrin doing movie everything? Any movie that involves space, they have to ask Buzz Aldrin. But it's not realistic because in space you don't get that much noise.

That's his only point. He goes, the scenes of the cities were remarkable, but different slightly from his experience on the moon, which he described as desolation. It really bumps me out that we turned this amazing astronaut into a joke. We did? Yes, we did. I think he did. I think he turned himself into a joke. I guess so, but we've done it with our Olympic athletes, too. It's like, is nothing sacred? Where are our heroes? Seriously. Seriously.

I will say Buzz Aldrin is the reason I didn't see Great Gatsby because he gave it a very bad review. Not enough space. Oh, man. The cities were breathtaking. All right. Well, there's a lot of great stuff on Wikipedia. You can read all the different people's reviews and thoughts about it. A noted professor of Scientology did say there's no connection between these two things. He studied Scientology. An independent, not a Scientologist. Yeah, not a Scientologist. He said that it is...

he does not find anything there. A lot of people have been attacking it that way. Because people are saying that Will Smith is a secret Scientologist. That he won't come out and say that he is, but that he's hanging out with Scientologists. And he donated all that money to a Scientology school, but this professor... And he said, I'm a Scientologist. Yeah.

But then quickly said J.K. LOL, J.K., R-O-T-F-L. All right, well, Paul, you are going to be in London, is that correct? That is correct. July 8th through the 13th, I will be returning to the Soho Theater, bringing my show Crying and Driving back to that place. I'm very excited.

Also, may I point out, this is a plug that concerns Jason Mantzoukas. We just recorded episode 24 of the Dead Authors podcast. Oh, such a great podcast. Which features, which Paul, you have done, and features Jason Mantzoukas as Plato. Fantastic. So that'll be coming out very soon. And mind you, it is not funny at all. It is a very serious...

It's exhausting. Of platonic philosophy. Yes, yes. So comedy fans, stay in the trailer. Comedy fans, don't bother. Can I hear a little bit of Plato? What Plato sounds like? Yeah, sure. May I talk to Plato? Hold on. Hey, what's going on? Spoiler alert. Plato actually says in the course of this episode, I'm not on Twitter, guys.

Oh my God. June, you have anything you'd like to talk about? Well, NTSF is coming back this July. And Burning Love is still up on burninglove.com. Yeah. Oh, actually, as a matter of fact, NTSF is having a big marathon rolling into our third season. So you can start watching it at Thursdays at midnight. So there you go. Yeah. I'm going to have a big marathon myself. Oh, well, geez. Sorry. Thank you, Paula, for joining us. And so I guess don't see...

after Earth unless you have an hour and 40 minutes to kill and you really can't do anything else and your iPad's dead and you can't call anybody. And you just need to delay your smoothie. Or your Indigiant birds.

If you like giant birds and weird wheelchairs, go see this movie. Absolutely. Giant bird fans, this is a must. I mean, that's it. Because you'll be bummed if your giant bird buddies are like, well, after Earth, obvi. And you're like, oh, I didn't see it. I heard it was bad. And they're like, giant bird in it, bro. My GBBs really gave me the business. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. I'm just gonna be... In love.

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